I'm Bored

For those of you new to teaching online, being bored is likely the last thing to come to mind.  However, in my CNG 101 class, I've become bored.  I'm grading the same assignments, posting the same news and discussions and I think my boredom is starting to influence my teaching.  So, I'm going to make some changes.

No, I'm not reinventing the wheel or even changing books, but rather just changing up how I do things.  For example, I've had a weekly quiz which is three short paragraphs.  I'm going to change this up to be a matching question of terms and then some multiple choice questions instead. With the reduction in writing in the weekly assignments, I'm going to add an essay question to the Unit Exams.  They'll be graded the same way, just in different places.

I also want to make the discussion board more formal, at least the initial post.  Right now, students aren't graded on their writing ability (grammar, sentence structure, spelling, etc.) in the discussion boards.  The problem is by this point in the semester, the boards are sloppy and very difficult to read.  Students log in Sunday night, post quickly reply twice to others in the class and call it good.  This isn't what I want.  I want longer, more thoughtful discussions.

So, I'm looking at fewer discussions with more points for each.  I want to make each one more valuable.  I'm also thinking of requiring students to submit their first post before being able to read and post other's thoughts.  I'm just getting too much "group think" in the discussions.  Any other ideas for making the discussion board more formal?

No matter what I decide on the discussions, I'm sure the summer will be anything but boring.

Quizzzzzz

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but why do outages (or slowdowns) always happen when you are trying to grade?

Accommodations

I suppose a big part of this blog is talking about things which come up you weren't planning for.  Well, one hit this morning.  I got an email from Roxanne asking me to make accommodations for a student with learning disabilities.

While this is something I have done many times in classes at PPCC, it's a first for me at CCCOnline.  However, it turned out not to be a big deal.  The student needed some extra time to complete timed exams.  Since I only have six Unit Exams and a Final which are timed, I only had seven items to fix.

In D2L, the project became even easier to complete.  I went to the Quiz and clicked on the pencil and went to the Restriction tab.  At the bottom is Special Access.  I gave the student special access, picked the time I wanted to give and saved.  All is done and it took me less than 15 minutes.

Sometimes, the surprises aren't that big a deal!